


Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response

by Misty_Floros



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, First Kiss, Romance, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22483849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misty_Floros/pseuds/Misty_Floros
Summary: Francine’s roommate becomes a popular ASMR whisperer, possibly unknowingly.
Relationships: Amelia F. Jones/Alice Kirkland
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response

**Author's Note:**

> The ASMR phenomenon has recently come to my attention, and I had this idea. I don’t know much about the American education system or the reality of American universities, so if something is really off, please let me know.
> 
> Characters: Amelia (US), Alice (UK), Francine (France), Julchen (Prussia), Matthew (Canada), Lisa (Netherlands), Heracles (Greece).

Francine stared at the piece of conceptual art on the exterior side of their door.

A pair of boxers was pinned there, along with a note written in familiar haughty, impeccable, stick-up-the-arse handwriting: _Dear person who had sex with Francine the last, it seems you forgot something. Yours faithfully, Francine’s long-suffering roommate._

She burst into the room and exclaimed, “What is this supposed to mean?”

Her roommate didn’t even look up from whatever she was writing. “It’s beyond me how anyone can forget to put on their underwear.”

“That’s not the point. Why did you have to hang it up?”

“I think it’s an appropriate form of retaliation for your dragging hook-ups here every bloody week.”

“And where else am I supposed to go with them?”

“The bathroom, the bushes, the billiard table downstairs… I don’t care. Just not here.”

“You’re a prude and I hate you,” Francine concluded. Then she inquired with apprehension, “How long has the underwear been hanging on our door?”

“I put it up at about eight o’clock.”

Francine exhaled in relief. It was only nine p. m.

“In the morning,” her roommate added.

Francine grabbed the nearest object, which happened to be a shoehorn, and chucked it at her roommate’s head. The girl dodged it and cackled evilly.

When the poor boy to whom the offending piece of clothing belonged learned about the incident, he was indeed embarrassed and became reluctant to visit Francine’s room. Such a shame, he was quite the catch. Tall, adorable, with silky hair through which she was fond of running her hands.

A plan for revenge formed one afternoon when her friend and fellow KKG member Julchen had come to her room to discuss the details of a welcoming party they were throwing for the freshmen in their sorority.

Her roommate was in the room as well, reading notes from lectures, even though she usually studied in the library or outside. She had the habit of mumbling to herself what she was just reading. Currently, what Francine was able to discern was something about the Middle East.

The constant mumbling pissed Francine off because it made it difficult to focus and kind of put her to sleep.

Julchen grasped her arm all of sudden and dragged her out into the hallway. She said, a devilish grin on her face, “Bro, that sounds like that ASMR stuff.”

“What?”

“Your roommate’s weird whispering. Doesn’t it make you want to sleep?”

“It does!” Francine nodded, glad her friend understood.

“It’s a thing, you know? There are thousands of YouTube videos of people whispering because it makes others relax or some shit. Anyway, it isn’t supposed to be sexual, but some people use it to make weird soft porn for loners. So that’s what I thought we could do.”

“Make soft porn for loners?”

“Yeah, but like, a parody. You wanted revenge, right?”

Francine needed no coaxing to get on board with the plan. Next time the opportunity arose, she secretly recorded a six-minute audio of her roommate’s mumbling and sent it to Julchen for editing.

Her friend eliminated the background noise and took care of the visual aspect. From the depths of the internet, she dug out photographs of Francine’s roommate and, among other creative adjustments, pasted random pictures of boobs on her chest and put cut-outs of her head onto bodies of naked women and men. She interspersed these works of art with excerpts from bad historical films, her favourite sources of material being 300 and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

They posted the video to their sorority chapter’s Slack workspace. Francine wrote: “My roommate wishes you goodnight with this incredible ASMR.”

They didn’t expect the feedback:

“If it was only the audio, I swear I’d be asleep in three minutes.”

“Tingles!!!!! Also, Men in Tights?! :D”

“Please make more, I never thought I’d be so happy to listen to someone drone on about the politics of Ancient Phoenicia.”

“I’m confused. Is that Fran’s roommate in those quality edits? Is that her voice? Anyways whoever is speaking is a total goddess.”

“All the Spartan abs really disturb my ASMR.”

“This made me rofl, but then I played only the audio and dude, head orgasm.”

“Hilarious vid aside, this is some seriously good ASMR material.”

So Julchen, like the economics student she was, wondered, “Do you think we can make some cash out of this?”

And so the YouTube channel Historical Whispers was born. They deliberately made no links to the first parody video—after all, they didn’t want to provide good publicity for Francine’s roommate.

* * *

Amelia opened the door and was immediately hit by the smell of weed. It was particularly pungent today.

“Hey Mattie!” she yelled.

A clearly stoned Matthew was sitting on the floor, leaning against the frame of his bed. “Hi Amy. Can you please be quiet? We’re having a meditating session.”

She automatically imitated the dumb smile which was currently on her brother’s face. “Okay, okay.”

The other inhabitant of the dorm room, Heracles, was sitting on his bed with his eyes closed. Lisa, a friend of theirs who spent more time in their room than she did in her own, was sitting next to him and was in the process of taking a profound drag from a joint. The small speakers on Matthew’s desk were playing a guided meditation.

“Jeez,” Amelia muttered and sat at her desk, hoping she could focus on the project for her Electrical Engineering class. Goddamn art students apparently didn’t have anything better to do than laze around and get high.

The guided meditation ended and on came a recording of some guy whispering about his book collection. Amelia looked up from her laptop screen and raised her eyebrows.

“What the hell is that?” she asked loudly.

“It’s ASMR-inducing,” was Matthew’s response. “Please, can you be quiet?”

“What the fuck is ASMR?” Amelia demanded.

Matthew sighed and paused the recording. “It stands for… something. It makes you relax and you get kind of a tingling sensation. Really nice stuff. And videos of people whispering cause this sensation, you know? It’s very helpful with anxiety and all sorts of bad stuff.”

“Okay, cool,” Amelia said, finding Matthew’s attempt at explanation quite unhelpful, “I’m sure it’s great, but I can’t focus on studying like this.”

“That’s not good. I’m really sorry,” Matthew said, genuinely apologetic, but clearly not intending to end their meditation.

“It’s okay. I wanted to go outside anyway.”

Seriously, this was the last year she was rooming with her brother and his stoner friend, or rather friends, seeing as Lisa practically lived in the room as well.

* * *

The next day, Amelia came into the room to a recording of a woman whispering while role-playing as a flight attendant, which was even weirder than the guy whispering about his book collection.

“This isn’t, like, a sex thing, is it?” she asked her brother.

“No. It isn’t about that at all. It’s about relaxation,” Matthew said.

“But dude, people whispering is kind of…”

“Well, it’s usually intimate, so that’s why it might seem sexual, I guess,” he shrugged.

Amelia pulled headphones out of her bag and put on instrumental music, switching on her laptop to work on the project.

An hour later, she decided it was time for a break and a cup of bad instant coffee. She grabbed the electric kettle sitting on the chest of drawers, filled it with water, and waiting for it to boil, listened to the recording her roommates had on now. It took her a moment to make out what the person was saying. It was a very quiet female voice, and if Amelia had thought the flight attendant had been sexual, it had been nothing compared to this.

It was a tone of voice which was fit to whisper dirty encouragements into one’s ear rather than to narrate the socioeconomic conditions of the late nineteenth century. The sentences weren’t always finished, and sometimes the woman just mumbled to herself “right”, as if she was reading a book and was off-handedly muttering to herself. It sounded completely spontaneous and just like someone studying. It shouldn’t have been a turn-on at all, but somehow it made Amelia’s entire body jolt with a sensation that definitely wasn’t relaxation.

And the fucking accent. It was an honest-to-God BBC accent emphasised to the maximum, as if the person was purposefully accentuating every difference in pronunciation there was between American and British English (or rather, between American and posh London English). Amelia had a bit of a thing for that on its own, but when the accented words were being _whispered_ … holy shit.

Amelia hastily put the headphones back on to avoid further embarrassment by her own involuntary reaction to something others apparently found relaxing.

Later, she couldn’t help but look through her brother’s meditation playlist. She supposed “Historical Whispers: Fin du siècle” was what she was looking for. She truly didn’t want to, but in the end couldn’t help but look it up.

When she was alone in the room the next afternoon, she played on one of the videos. It turned out to be only an audio recording with a picture of a river accompanying it.

She paused the recording a few times, feeling like a creeper for being turned on by the quiet murmur. But she couldn’t help it—it just sounded so intimate. It made her imagine some sort of romantic foreplay in a room lit by candles, the sort where your lover told you they wanted to take care of you and make you feel good. Or something. Amelia wouldn’t know.

The audios became her guilty pleasure. After she got over the initial unfamiliarity of someone whispering more or less into her ear, she supposed she found it increasingly soothing, but the sexual aspect of it never went away. It might have been part of being relaxed, but her body’s reaction certainly didn’t stop at the tingles most listeners talked about.

* * *

Unlike for her, ASMR appeared to be a group entertainment for the rest of the room residents. She managed to get through finals without a hitch only because she’d given up on studying in the room beforehand. She hoped that after winter break, her roommates would lay off on the guided meditation and ASMR YouTubers, but now that the spring semester was just starting and assignments hadn’t yet piled up, it only got worse.

She told Matthew, “Listen, I know I said I’d stick it out with you two this year, but do you, by any chance, know someone who’d be willing to switch with me?”

Matthew halted in the middle of an attempt to light the tip of his joint. “Oh. I’m really sorry, Amy. We’re kind of shitty roomies, aren’t we?”

“You are. So again, do you know anyone?”

Heracles sat up on his bed sluggishly, blinking as if he’d just woken up. He probably had. “If there’s something we can do to make you feel better here, just say so.”

“Yeah, quit smoking that stuff all the time and stop meditating in here.”

Matthew, Heracles, and Lisa exchanged glances silently.

Matthew then said, “Heracles and I have a… friend who’s always complaining about her roommate. Maybe she’d agree to switch.”

Amelia grinned. “Great! Will you ask her then?”

“Sure.”

When Matthew informed her that the girl had agreed, Amelia couldn’t pack her belongings fast enough.

However horrible that roommate might be, she was sure she’d deal with it. Just no more weed, no more flight attendants, no more guided meditation, no more suggestive English-accented history narration when she wasn’t safely alone.

* * *

“So, you and your roomie didn’t get along?” Amelia asked as she hauled the hastily packed duffel bag into the room. The other resident, Alice, was sitting on her bed with a book. She had a slight frame and short blonde hair, and there was a sort of inherent intelligence in her eyes. Amelia sincerely hoped they would grow to be on friendly terms with one another.

“That’s an understatement. I’d endure it, but when the frog said she was switching with someone, I obviously wasn’t going to say no,” Alice said. “Seriously, I’ve never met a worse nymphomaniac. I swear even the walls stink of sex at this point.”

Amelia gave an experimental sniff. “Uh, I can’t smell anything.”

Alice snorted. “It’s called a hyperbole.”

“Oh, right. I couldn’t study because my roommates meditated all the time.”

“Isn’t that a quiet activity?”

“They were always playing these guided meditations and shit. Those make you want to sleep whether you like it or not.”

Alice cracked a smile. “Well, I hope we can both finally get some peace.”

Amelia grinned back. “You can definitely count on me.”

* * *

Alice didn’t spend much time in the room—she was usually studying in the library or in the common area of their residence hall or she was out tutoring—so Amelia had enough space to work on assignments undisturbed and also to listen to her favourite YouTube channel.

Speaking of which, in the last video description, the woman had written it was the last recording, and she wouldn’t be posting videos anymore.

Amelia was a bit sad about that, but at least she wouldn’t have new content to fuel her addiction. She felt even weirder about it now that she had Alice as her roommate—the girl was a junior History student, and Amelia had sure as hell noticed that her accent resembled the one in the audios. The similarities were there, and Amelia didn’t want to know what she would think if she found out.

“Where are you from anyway?” Alice had inquired during the second evening of their coexistence. They hadn’t exchanged many words the day before, as Alice hadn’t seemed to have any intention to converse beyond introductions and talking about their majors. This was probably the first conversation she’d initiated.

“Arizona,” Amelia said, as she was drying her hair with a towel. “I grew up in a really small town, so it was a bit of a shock when I came here last year. Like, the university alone has a bigger population than my hometown. So yeah. What about you? If I had to guess I’d say you were English.”

“I do come from England, from London actually.”

“Why did you decide to study in the States, then? I mean, like, academics from the entire world are totally hot for British universities, so why go here? I mean, not that they ain’t hot for American ones too, but like…”

Alice’s mouth curved up minutely. “It’s a bit complicated. I moved to America with my mum and her husband five years ago. They met when he was on holiday in England, and my mum wanted to move here with him, so we did.”

“You don’t sound too happy about that.”

“I didn’t mind at the time. I was actually very excited about it, and it was only later that I started realising there were cultural differences, most of which I don’t really like. You know, I thought that since the language was the same, it’d be just like home, only with less rain. I really miss that now, by the way.” She paused. “Hell, I didn’t mean to get so negative on you. I’m probably breaking every rule of small talk there is.”

“No, I don’t mind! Seriously, say whatever you want,” Amelia assured her and hung up the towel over the backrest of a chair. She sat down on her bed, facing Alice. “God knows I say a lot of weird stuff even to people I don’t know. So, you miss the rain? Doesn’t it make people depressed, though?”

A shrug. “Maybe it does. But I like it.”

“You like being depressed?”

An eye-roll. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, yeah. Yanno, it seems to me that it’s a bit of a dick move not to like the rain, since it’s hella difficult to grow food without it. But sun is good for mental health, ain’t it? Actually, now that I think about it, I recently read an article where they said people living close to the ocean were less prone to depression or whatever. Maybe it evens out the rain.”

“That’s quite possible.”

“So, do you plan to go back to England?”

“Definitely. If everything goes well, I intend to go there for postgraduate studies.”

“Cool. I like the idea of going abroad to study, but there isn’t really reason to, yanno? Besides, I suck at languages, and learning all the technical terms in a different language is like, no thanks.”

“That’s understandable,” Alice said and gave her a small smile before turning back to her book.

* * *

“I still feel really bad for ousting you out of the room,” Matthew said, sitting across from Amelia in the cafeteria. They were one of the last ones getting lunch, as it was quite late.

“I told you, it’s fine. I get it. You have your friends and want to do your stuff, and I have different roommate expectations than artsy hippies.”

Matthew munched on his salad and teased, “Like hot, serious history students?”

“Fuck off.” Amelia felt her face heat up. “How can you even know what she’s like? You haven’t met her.”

“You’ve described to me how smart she is five times and how green her eyes are thrice in the last ten minutes. Besides, I have met her.”

“What? When?”

Matthew shrugged. “I’ve seen her around. You know, I bet she’s gay.”

“What the hell do you know about gay women?”

“More than you, apparently.”

“You’re so mean.”

“Sorry, Amy. But I’m serious. Short hair, dresses like Ellen, never looks at Heracles twice.”

“Heracles knows her too? Okay, whatever. Those things don’t mean anything.” They really didn’t. Based on previous experience, especially the short hair didn’t. Most embarrassing moments of her life.

“Fine, maybe you’re right. But you like her, don’t you?”

“I don’t even know her yet,” Amelia protested.

“Your face is red,” Matthew informed her.

“Okay, so I think she’s pretty, but I think that about a lot of people. Now drop it.”

Matthew raised his hands in surrender.

* * *

A little over a week had gone by since Amelia moved rooms. Alice and she got along fine. They didn’t talk all that much, but when they did, Amelia went on about things that were on her mind, and Alice let her. She usually only spoke when she really had something to say, and Amelia thought she acted older than she was. Amelia would feel childish and dumb in comparison if it weren’t for the fact that Alice actually looked interested in Amelia’s ramblings.

It was Tuesday, which meant Amelia had lectures since morning until three in the afternoon and then a five-hour shift at the nearby café. She was tired and wished to do nothing but sleep. She’d even turned down an invitation to get a drink with fellow Mechanical Engineering students.

Alice was in the room, sitting at her desk with a book.

“Whatcha reading?” Amelia asked.

“Just something about social classes in antiquity.”

“Sounds… interesting,” Amelia said. She remembered a similar topic appearing in one of the Historical Whispers audios and felt her face heat up slightly.

She went to the bathrooms to take a shower and brush her teeth, and crawled into bed as soon as she came back.

“Are you all right?” Alice asked.

“Yeah. Just tired.”

“Do you mind me studying here, then? I could go somewhere else.”

“No, it’s fine. I wanna check my e-mail and stuff anyways. And I can sleep just about anywhere, so don’t worry about that.” She settled into the blankets and squinted at her phone.

“Right,” Alice mumbled to herself, head bowed over the book, “… the dramatically increased role of urban production and interregional commerce.” The murmur was barely audible, but Amelia was well-versed in listening to those. “Most economic historians… concede the towns served as a centre of production, which catered to the aggregate demand of peasants and small farmers… not just the demands of wealthy landholding citizens… This model fits the world of Mediterranean cities around the time of Alexander the Great.”

Amelia’s body and brain had frozen. Was this a habit of all history students or something?

“… these patterns of production and retail almost completely disappeared in the last three centuries before the Common Era. Throughout the ancient world…”

Alice’s mumbling was even worse than Historical Whispers. Or it might have been on the same level, but made worse by the fact that Alice was good-looking and just there next to her. The Devil was probably laughing his ass off somewhere.

Feeling her cheeks burn and body react, Amelia bit her lip. She decided the best course of action would be pretending to sleep and trying to convince her brain that the whispering was nothing but soothing. She put her phone and glasses on the bedside table and lay on her side, her back to Alice. For about ten minutes, she stayed motionless and listened to Alice’s voice. It sounded exactly like the audios she’d been listening to.

An insane thought entered her mind. What if Alice was the person behind the channel? She didn’t seem the type to post on YouTube—hell, she didn’t even have a Facebook account—but it just sounded _exactly like her._

In the end, Amelia put on her headphones and fell asleep to the Interstellar soundtrack.

* * *

With each occasion of listening to her roommate whisper to herself, Amelia became less and less capable of looking her in the eye.

Alice was now in the middle of learning about law in colonial America, which Amelia knew because she was _suggestively whispering it aloud_ , and Amelia just couldn’t take it anymore. Did Alice know what she was doing to her? Probably not.

“Hey Alice. Do you do ASMR by any chance?” Amelia’s voice came out all strangled. She grimaced.

Alice turned away from her book. “What?”

“Do you do ASMR?”

“What’s that?”

All right, so it seemed it wasn’t Alice in the audios. While that didn’t exactly solve anything, at least it detracted from the weirdness of the situation.

“Well, it’s these recordings of sounds which make people relax. Most of them are people whispering.” Amelia hoped her face wasn’t as red as she feared it might be. “I just, you mumble to yourself a lot when you study, and it sounds exactly like an ASMR I once heard.” Once, ha.

Alice wore a confused expression. “Oh, okay?”

“It’s a crazy coincidence, I guess. There’s just a popular channel of a woman whispering about history, and I swear it sounds exactly like you.”

Alice raised her eyebrows. “Can I see it?”

“Just search ‘Historical Whispers’ on YouTube,” Amelia said, not keen on disclosing the collection of downloaded mp3 files on her phone.

Alice opened her laptop, and having found the channel, she scrolled through the videos for some time, apparently reading their titles. She clicked on the last one, and a familiar recording concerning the Scientific Revolution started playing.

_“From the outset the Royal Society aspired to combine the role of research institute with that of clearinghouse for knowledge and forum for arbitration, though the latter function became dominant after the society’s earliest years. A key development was the establishment in sixteen sixty-five of a periodical that acted as the society’s mouthpiece—“_

About a minute in, she paused it, to Amelia’s relief and disappointment. She pulled out a book from the pile on her desk, flipped through it, and pushed it towards Amelia. “Here, see?”

Amelia read the passage at which Alice was pointing. It truly was the exact same text as in the audio.

“It’s either somebody who studies the exact same thing as me and reads the exact same things I read and sounds exactly like me, or it’s me.”

“Uh, shouldn’t you know that?” Amelia said, puzzled.

Alice was quiet for a while and then said, “I’m going to bloody kill her.” And with that, she bolted out of the room, leaving Amelia flabbergasted.

After a few minutes, Alice returned to the room. Her face was flushed red. She walked straight to her laptop and refreshed the YouTube page.

“You deleted it?” Amelia asked.

“I forced Francine to do it, yes,” Alice confirmed, plopping down onto her chair and covering her face with her hands.

Amelia eyed her worriedly. “You okay?”

Alice shook her head. “They recorded me without my knowledge and shared it with thousands of people on the internet.” Her voice was strained with rage. “I... I hate them so fucking much right now. Who the fuck does that?”

Amelia didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Uh, who did it?”

“The frog and her stupid best friend, who else.”

Amelia ventured, “Can I give you a hug? You look like you could use it.”

Alice stared at her with those green eyes of hers and gave a small nod, so Amelia put her arms around her and pulled her close. She focused on the provision of comfort and tried to ignore her own longing for this kind of intimacy.

Later, she deleted all the Historical Whispers audios from her phone.

* * *

Three days had passed, and Alice was in their room reading her notes from that day’s classes. Amelia was lying in her bed, procrastinating on her phone, feeling frankly envious of her roommate’s studying habits, when she realised something: Alice wasn’t murmuring to herself.

Amelia swept it aside that time, but after three more instances of being present while Alice was studying and not hearing her whisper, she started thinking it had something to do with the Francine incident.

“Hey, Alice, why don’t you, you know, mumble to yourself anymore?” Amelia asked her before she could think better of it.

Alice turned her head to look at her. “Perhaps I don’t want to.”

“Uh, why?”

“Are you seriously asking this?”

“I am. Are you embarrassed about it?”

Alice eyed the floor and admitted, “Well, yes. I think I have a good reason to be.”

“You know, the recordings actually helped some people. Your voice helped them relax and stuff. Someone there said they’d been in the military and ASMR helped them to deal with psychical problems. So like, you did a good thing, even if it was without your consent. The listeners are probably really sad you deleted the channel.”

“Are you trying to make me feel guilty about it now?” Alice’s voice had a sharp edge to it.

“No, no! Of course not. I’m just saying the videos weren’t anything bad.”

“How do you know so much about it anyway?” Alice asked flatly. “Are you one of those weirdoes who find it soothing?”

Amelia didn’t say anything for a while, which of course gave her away. Staring at the ceiling, she said in a small voice, “Sort of. But I’m actually worse.”

“Worse?” Alice furrowed her brows.

“I mean, I find it soothing, but also kind of sexual.” Covering her eyes with her forearm, Amelia cursed her inability to lie.

Alice remained silent for a few beats and then stammered, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I probably made you really uncomfortable, didn’t I? I had no idea, I—“

Amelia chuckled at her frantic apologies, “No, it’s not a problem.”

“Well, it is, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable around me.”

“No, I mean, it’s really, really not a problem,” Amelia said weakly.

“But you said...” Alice trailed off.

“It’s just… I like your voice. And your whispering.” She swallowed nervously. “I really like it.”

Alice was silent for a moment, then got up from her chair and crouched by Amelia’s bed. “What are you saying?”

Amelia let her arm fall onto the pillow, and her gaze flickered to Alice, who was blushing and looking straight at her. Amelia hoped her vocal chords still worked. She took a deep breath and said, “I… I’m sorry, okay. I can’t help it. If you want to move to another room, it’s fine. I’m sure it could be arranged somehow.”

Alice’s eyes still haven’t left her face, and Amelia prayed her roommate couldn’t hear her quickened heartbeat. Then Alice cupped Amelia’s burning cheeks in her cold hands and said, “Do you want me to whisper something to you?”

Amelia stared, wide-eyed. “You—you want to? I know it made you super uncomfortable to know people listened to you, so—“

“I want to. It’s my choice and it’s you. So would you like that?”

Amelia stared some more and then gave a small nod.

Alice leant down, so that her mouth was right next to Amelia’s ear, and started in a low voice, “I’m not feeling very creative right now, but I’ll try.”

Alice’s breathing next to her ear was giving her goosebumps, and she closed her eyes at the sensation.

“Is it only my voice you like? Or is it… more?”

Amelia felt the whisper travel down her body. The tone of voice, the closeness, the goddamn accent—she felt hot all over. She forced out, “It’s more. But your voice is what makes me go fucking crazy.”

Alice chuckled and continued in the same hushed tone, “That’s… nice to hear, I suppose. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I’m very much attracted to you.” She paused. “I think one of the things which draw me to you is your spontaneity. I admire the way you say what’s on your mind, and how open with feelings you are.”

Amelia jolted when she felt a cool hand on her hip, where her shirt was riding up.

“You have this natural charm which I don’t really understand, but which I apparently can’t resist,” Alice murmured then. “And which I don’t want to resist, but I don’t know what exactly this means to you yet.”

“I think we’re on the same page here,” Amelia whispered back, swallowing nervously.

Her entire body shivered when Alice started drawing tentative circles into the exposed skin on her hip. “I have the impression,” Alice continued, “that you’re quite oblivious to your own beauty. Or maybe just oblivious to its effect on others. You often tell me about circuits while you’re taking off your bra. It’s quite unfair of you.”

Amelia laughed, but the sound turned into a gasp when she felt Alice’s mouth touch a spot under her jaw, lingering.

“Was that all right?”

Amelia shuffled to lie on her hip and responded by pressing her lips to Alice’s. The angle wasn’t ideal, and Amelia put her hand on Alice’s side to tug her body closer to hers. Alice crawled onto the bed and straddled her, kissing her tentatively. Their lips locked lightly in short, exploratory kisses. Amelia then slid a hand into Alice’s hair and kept her in place, turning the kiss deep. Their mouths moved against each other, and hands roamed and caressed.

Alice pulled away, panting. Amelia barely had time to catch her own breath before Alice dipped down to mumble into her ear, “I don’t think I’ll have got enough of you anytime soon. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I definitely don’t,” Amelia squeaked.

Alice kissed her again with insistence, her hand sliding upwards under Amelia’s T-shirt, settling teasingly on her ribcage. Amelia liked that a lot, but there was another thing she wanted to do. She lifted herself up on her elbows and then sat up, taking off her glasses. When they were kneeling comfortably in front of each other, she kissed Alice’s neck, breathing in her subtle citrusy perfume. Alice’s hand dropped to Amelia’s thigh, which Amelia took as a cue to continue and pressed her lips to different spots lightly. She sucked on the skin, and Alice gasped, so she did the same thing again but harder, making Alice moan.

If she could have sounds like that, Amelia was sure she wouldn’t need any ASMR anymore.

Or maybe she could have both, she thought later, when the last hours of the day found her drifting off to sleep with Alice nestled in her arms and whispering goodnight.

* * *

“No meditation today?” Amelia commented when she went to pay her former roommates a visit.

“We do have to study sometimes, too, you know,” Heracles said.

“Sure, sure,” Amelia teased. “Are you still addicted to that ASMR crap?”

“You bet,” said Lisa.

“I heard the history lady deleted her channel.” Amelia tried to sound as disinterested as she could.

“Yeah, it’s a shame,” Lisa nodded. “But Heracles has some of the videos saved on his phone, so it’s fine.”

“Really?” Amelia said. “Can I see which ones?”

“Sure,” Heracles said and having opened the music folder, handed her his phone.

Amelia ignored her brother’s puzzled expression and scrolled through the folder. One by one, she calmly deleted every single Historical Whispers file. Returning the phone, she said, “Thanks a bunch, man. I gotta go now.”

She flashed Matthew a grin and booked it before they could find out.

**Author's Note:**

> Sources of excerpts:  
> https://www.britannica.com/topic/Royal-Society (edited)  
> The Ancient Middle Classes (book by Emanuel Mayer)
> 
> Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the story, and if so, I’ll be glad if you let me know via kudos/a comment.


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